People
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Maria Teresa Tula
Biography: Maria Teresa Tula is a leader of the Co-Madres (Mothers of the Disappeared) of El Salvador, a group of impoverished, mostly illiterate women whose husbands or children were kidnapped or killed by death squads and government security forces during El Salvador’s bloody civil war. The 1980s conflict pitted leftist organizations and campesino farmer-based guerrillas…
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Rigoberta Menchú Tum
Interview: Struggles for the rights of poor people, for dignity, for human life, seem to be very, very dark tunnels, but one should always try, in that struggle, to find some light and some hope. The most important thing to have is a great quantity of positive feelings and thoughts. Even though one can easily…
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Francisco Soberon
Biography: Dawn arrived in Peru in January 1980 and with it, a sight the world has never imagined. All over the country, dead dogs hung from lampposts announcing the first actions of Sendero Luminoso—the Shining Path, a Marxist guerrilla organization whose war against Peru’s landed power oligarchy swept the country into a state of emergency…
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Bishop Wissa
Biography: The Coptic (Egyptian Christian) Church traces its roots to Saint Mark, who is believed to have established it in Alexandria in a.d. 64. Since that time, Copts have been at best grudgingly tolerated, but often persecuted outright in Egypt. Today, there are nearly ten million Copts living in Egyptian territory who face frequent harassment…
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Digna Ochoa
Biography: One of the foremost human rights attorneys in Mexico, Digna Ochoa was also a nun. As defense attorney at PRODH (Centro de Derechos Humanos Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez, known as Centro Pro, or “the Pro”), Ochoa took on some of Mexico’s most politically charged cases, including the defense of alleged members of the Zapatista…
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Guillaume Ngefa Atondoko
Biography: Researching, recording, and exposing grave human rights abuses committed by Zaire’s notorious dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, Guillaume Ngefa risked his life on a daily basis. As founder and president of his country’s premier human rights organization, L’Association Africaine de Défense des Droits de l’Homme (African Association for the Defense of Human Rights, or ASADHO),…
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Wei Jingsheng
Biography: Wei Jingsheng came to symbolize the struggle for human rights and democracy in China, when, after the Cultural Revolution, he was among the first to demand a freer society. In spite of the threat of imprisonment, Wei spoke openly with the Western press, publishing articles demanding reform and comparing the policies of all-powerful Premier…
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Helen Prejean
Biography: Louisiana, 1977. Brothers Patrick and Eddie Sonnier admitted mugging David LeBlanc, age seventeen, and Loretta Bourque, eighteen, one autumn night, but each blamed the other for murdering them and raping Bourque. Eddie was sentenced to life, Patrick to death by electrocution. In the summer of 1982, Sister Helen Prejean had moved into St. Thomas…
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Patria Jimenez
Biography: Mexico’s first openly homosexual member of Congress, Patria Jiménez Flores was elected in 1998 at the age of forty-one. The ninth of ten children in a conservative Catholic family, Jiménez overcame her own family’s prejudices to confront the bigotry of society at large. She works on issues of homophobic violence, violations of basic rights,…
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Asma Jahangir And Hina Jilani
Biography: Threatened with death from the very halls of parliament when she called for the abolition of repressive shari‘a laws contravening constitutional protection of women, Asma Jahangir also put her life on the line in 1993 when she represented an illiterate fourteen-year-old sentenced to death for blasphemous graffiti on the side of a mosque. Muslim…
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Freedom Neruda
Biography: Journalism has become one of the world’s most dangerous professions, with dozens of deaths and hundreds imprisoned because they exercised their freedom of speech. Freedom Neruda exemplifies the extraordinary courage of these engaged journalists who report the news despite severe restrictions by the state. Born Teiti Roch D’Assomption in the Ivory Coast in 1956,…
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Freedom Neruda
Journalism has become one of the world’s most dangerous professions, with dozens of deaths and hundreds imprisoned because they exercised their freedom of speech. Freedom Neruda exemplifies the extraordinary courage of these engaged journalists who report the news despite severe restrictions by the state. Born Teiti Roch D’Assomption in the Ivory Coast in 1956, he…
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